In order to improve the quality of systematic researches, various tools have been developed by well-known scientific institutes sporadically. Dr. Nader Ale Ebrahim has collected these sporadic tools under one roof in a collection named “Research Tool Box”. The toolbox contains over 720 tools so far, classified in 4 main categories: Literature-review, Writing a paper, Targeting suitable journals, as well as Enhancing visibility and impact factor.

Monday, 10 February 2014

Maximizing the Visibility and Impact of Your Published Research

Maximizing the Visibility and Impact of Your Published Research

Introduction

Measuring the inter-and cross-disciplinary impact of your
published research can be a valuable indication of the achievement of
both an individual or unit and can play a role in a number of decision
making processes including:

Identifying Research Trends including:

Impact: Examine the dispersion of cited and citing works both within and across disciplines and geographic boundaries to capture the total impact of research collaboration and investment

Time: Consider the longitudinal impact and
value of publications i.e. the frequency and distribution both
publication output and citation impact over time

Prestige: Capture the scope and prestige of the publication in which the unit publishes

Funding and Grant Applications: profile performance and impact to demonstrate the track-record of a research entity.

Benchmarking Your Research Using Citation Analysis

Citation analysis (or bibliometrics) can provide valuable data for determining the impact of published research.

This is the discipline of measuring the performance of a
researcher, a collection of articles, a journal, a research discipline
or an institution.

This process involves the study of patterns of authorship, publication, and literature useto determine trends in output and citation impact.

Maximizing the Impact and Visibility of Your Published Research

When an article is submitted for publication, citation analytics
features (available via many business and multi-disciplinary
databases), enables you to monopolise on key components for mining
important metric-based quantitative data to measure impact. These
include:

Authors’ names: significant in determining who the key players are in the field of research

Institutional addresses: institutional
affiliation data (including affiliate institute name and address)
assigned to a publication is commonly captured to track citation
counts, one of a number of criteria used to rank institutional
performance and subsequently published in global university ranking
tables

The Journal in which you publish: this is not only an indication of the field of expertise but may also be an implicit measure of the prestige of accepted papers

References: the references included in a
paper can be a highly effective way of tracking citation patterns
and impact both within and across a discipline

Keywords and concepts: online publishing and
dissemination is changing the way researchers write articles. To
be spotted, articles must be structured with search engines in
mind – search engine optimization (see below).

Strategies to Increase Citations to Your Publications

Impact: Publish in high impact journals. Use the Journal Citation Reports database (available online via the Library) to find out which journals have the highest impact in your field

Visibility: Make it easy for others to
access your work by publishing in an Open Access journal and/or maximize
the exposure of your publications by depositing open access versions
in Spectrum, Concordia University’s Institutional Research Repository. Papers in Spectrum are indexed by indexed by Google Scholar, potentially increasing your citation impact!

Search engine optimization: Online
publishing and dissemination is changing the way researchers write
articles. To be spotted, articles must be structured with search
engines in mind.

Include important keywords in your abstract and title (the text fields most usually searched and read).

Avoid unnecessarily flowery language if possible.

Get counted: When publishing always use the same name variant. Your publication impact profile (particularly for journal articles) may be misrepresented when:

Authors alternate between using middle initials and/or shortened versions of their first names.

You publish under multiple names e.g. female authors marry and switch to publishing under their married name

Your papers are difficult to identify from those by authors with a similar name in citation databases.

Therefore:

Use a constant name syntax when publishing where possible

Consider creating a unique ResearcherID identifier for Web of Science.
This can include papers indexed in the Web of Science as well as
other publications which can be uploaded to your ResearcherID profile

Check your publication profile in the main citation indices like Web of Science which enables you to set up a citation tracking alert so that you are notified when your work is cited and by whom.

When publishing always use the same institutional name variant, including the complete University address when
submitting your manuscript for publication, as the address of
affiliation field is often used to retrieve publication outputs.

For more tips on how to increase citations to your published research see: 9 Simple Tips.

1. Individual or groups of authors

Web of Science is made up of three citation indices owned by Thomson Scientific:

Science Citation Index

Social Sciences Citation Index

Arts & Humanities Citation Index.

Within Web of Science, the ‘Author’ field on the search page enables you to determine the citation activity to an authors publication. You can also use ‘Author Finder’
to identify a particular author. Running an ‘author’ search can be
used to create a list of works they have written. Once you have
generated a list of publications by particular author you can generate acitation report to view graphs and summary data for results sets of 10,000 or fewer depicting the distribution of items by:

When they were published

When the items were cited

Number of citations per year (over a 5-year period)

Average number of citations (over a 5-year period)

The h-index - a useful bibliometric measure
in determining a researcher’s relative impact in his/her
discipline e.g. an h-index of 26 means that a researcher has
published 26 papers that have been cited at least 26 times each.

Note:The h-index is only
meaningful when compared to others within the same discipline area.
Researchers in one field may have very different h-indices than
researchers in another.

No citation index will give you a complete citation count.
Web of Science provides only a partial coverage. By searching a number
of citation indices you can gain a better idea of the actual citation
count for a particular article.

2. The Research Performance of an Individual Paper: Use Google Scholar

Google Scholar is the
scholarly arm of Google. It contains material across many disciplines
and sources including journal articles and books. Where available
citation tracking information is provided, including all the data
indexed in Google Books. This makes it the most comprehensive tool for checking book or book chapter citations.

Remember: citation indexes are primarily based on
selected journal literature. If the author is most likely to be cited in
books, non-English language journals, or journals not covered in the
database, the usefulness of citation analysis is limited.

3. Topic or field trends

The Web of Knowledge database Journal Citation Reports database allows you to evaluate and compare journals using citation data drawn from journals indexed by the Web of Science
database. It includes the disciplines of science, technology, and
social sciences. The JCR is available in 2 discipline specific
editions:

Science

Social Science

Using this tool you can view the:

Most frequently cited journals in a field

Hottest journals in a field

Highest impact journals in a field

Leading journals in a field

Related journals in a field

Citation characteristics for a subject category

Click here to view a brief tutorial on using the Journal Citation Reports database.

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About Me

Nader Ale Ebrahim has
a Technology Management PhD degree from the Department of Engineering
Design and Manufacture, Faculty of Engineering, University of Malaya
(UM), Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. He holds a Master of Science in the
mechanical engineering from University of Tehran, Iran.